Culture Heroes: Fredrik Hiebert

From Afghanistan to Peru, National Geographic Archaeology Fellow Fredrik Hiebert shares his enthusiasm for protecting cultural heritage by helping to repatriate looted artifacts.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

Culture Heroes: Fredrik Hiebert

From Afghanistan to Peru, National Geographic Archaeology Fellow Fredrik Hiebert shares his enthusiasm for protecting cultural heritage by helping to repatriate looted artifacts.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

Thank you all for coming out this evening. It really is an honor and pleasure to be here talking about National Geographic, and in somewhat of a light that maybe some of you know about and maybe some of you don't know about. I mean everybody knows about the golden rectangle and about the National Geographic magazine. Most of you know about our channel and the fact that through our media we reach almost four hundred million souls around the world. It's incredible, it's an honor to represent National Geographic but it's also equally important to remember that we are a funder of research and that we are a player, we're proactive.

If we want to tell the stories of people, places, cultures, ecology, whales and lions and other things that I don't deal with, we have to preserve that! We have to be able to take care of our world so that future generations, our kids and their kids will be able to turn to National Geographic and have the same stories to be told. You know, we have a very special thing with history and culture. It's very actually different from you know biological world or oceans and things like that. It's, the difference is the culture, the past, the remains of our history is nonrenewable. Like once a giant Buddha is destroyed it can't come back. It's gone! Once a site is destroyed that little piece of history that piece of peoples' identity is gone. You can't replace that And so, we become really sort of focused on what can we do as a group, as a bunch of you know, drummers in a band to get people so that we can say, yeah, we can actually do something. That's what this evening is all about.

When we look at the world and certainly that's something that's interesting about Geographic is that we do have as our research arena all the continents of the world even Antarctica, we don't have that. These circles here, these ovals are centers of civilization, centers of dense archaeological finds. As you can see, you know we're looking at something not on just one continent or another. We're not gonna talk about all of these. Tonight we're gonna look at a few case examples. But when we look at the whole issue of you know, how to keep cultures and keep identities and artifacts where they belong. How is it that these different cultures can become proud of their role in part of human history in defining humanity? It's huge, it's almost unbelievable. When I work with customs agents about what's coming through the airports and what's coming through our ports, its, you know I show them this picture and I say, you have a huge issue on your hands. You could have you know, artifacts from the Andes just as easily as you can have artifacts from Mali just as easily as you can have artifacts from Afghanistan in a box being transported away from its home. How are you gonna deal with that? That's something which is we're gonna talk about those kind of interesting topics tonight. And we're gonna look at a few of these areas. I call these archaeological hot spots. And I'm happy to tell you more about those archaeological hot spots in discussion. But I'm gonna give you a few examples. I'll give two, Afghanistan and Peru just to tell you a little bit about approaches that we can have.

Very positive approaches that we can help to inspire these artifacts and these cultures to remain alive in the countries where they are. These are archaeologically rich countries, right? All of them, all of them have so many sites it's hard to count them. Afghanistan is famous for its role on the Silk road, and we have artifacts all over the place. I think this was the first country where we had sort of an international recognition for a country's cultural heritage for something that we wish really didn't happen. This is a giant Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley. Huge, over a hundred feet tall, incredible built in the sixth, or seventh, or eighth century A.D. It's been famous. It was a tourist attraction. And many of you remember when it was destroyed. That sort of culture destruction cannot be replaced. And it, for the first time focused international attention on you know, the center of the Silk road and say, oh my goodness we didn't really realize that culture was a big factor in this. And I think when it was on the front pages of the New York Times, when it was on the pages of the National Geographic when you saw this on CNN you realize, oh, this is important. At the same time people have to realize that fragility of culture wasn't just at Pompeion.

This is two thousand and three when I first saw the National Museum of Afghanistan. This is the museum. No roof, no windows and inside, no artifacts. I went there on behalf of National Geographic magazine to sort of write a post script about what I thought was a tragedy, something that people should know about. But something else happened, okay. I went to the museum, all the way to Afghanistan. I had never actually been to Afghanistan before even though I had written about it. I had written reports in archaeology magazines. I wrote my dissertation on it. It was sort of like, I never thought I was going to Afghanistan. And I went and I talked to the museum director, this man Omara Khan Massoudi. He's one of my cultural heroes this evening is about. And I said, “What do I say about the treasures of Afghanistan?” And he said, “well you know the treasures of the National Museum meant a lot to us and you know before the museum was destroyed we hid them away.” Well, he said that's a secret but I'm telling you. And we ended up doing something that we never expected to do at National Geographic. We sponsored an inventory of the hidden collections of Afghanistan. This is one of the pieces. We put all these things on inventory, computerized, digital images and we created a passport for these objects. That meant that now these objects were visible to the whole world and could never actually be sold or marketed again. Kind of squashing a market for these objects. It also lead to the Bactrian Gold exhibition. They're feeling of sense of self about this within Afghanistan. A sense of great honor and sort of cultural heritage that they hadn't seen for 30 years. And that's a really positive thing that came out of working together on that.

There are other problems and we continue to work with the Afghans on issues on what happens during the situation when sites are looted. This is actually not an excavation. These are people who are just digging for treasures in Afghanistan. And it hurts me to look at this picture. My friend who excavated the Bactrian Gold, he took this picture and here's a picture of where those artifacts ended up. That's the marketplace in Kabul. I can't tell you how many four thousand year old burials this represents 'cause it's impossible for me to say that. But each one of those vessels represents a piece of culture which is out, and about to be sent abroad for pennies on each piece. It's tragic from a personal point of view, from an Afghan point of view and from a world point of view to see. That's a whole chapter of history right there.

So we do, do things and I am pleased to say that work with U.S. Customs. We work with UNESCO. We work with culture, with groups around the world. And one of the things that we do is we help. For example, this is U.S. Customs. This is a shipment of illegally transported artifacts that thanks to collaboration between the U.S. government and the governments around the world including Afghanistan and Peru and quite a few countries. We're able to say, look these pieces belong in a home and they can be sent back. And we're so pleased to be able to say that repatriations are an important part of what we do here at National Geographic, here in Washington DC. And the United States is a really good partner is doing these things. And I think it's a fantastic thing that you should all know about.

Let's turn quickly to my second example, which is Peru. So we've moved continents. This is a Peruvian pyramid. Sometimes hard to see so I put a little drawing of a pyramid to say, hey look, you know this is just like Egypt. You're gonna see some pictures of pyramids later. You know you've got pyramids that are known from the Mayan area from Egypt, but believe me they're in Peru too. But pyramids attract the attention of looters. And things from those pyramids have been on sale in the market for a long, long time. This is a piece from the exhibition that was on the market in Italy. We were so pleased when the ambassador from Peru asked the president of Italy, that's him in the front, please return this piece of Peruvian culture and they did. And it was like ancient Rome returning something to ancient Peru. I would've thought that, that's kind of a cool concept right? We're really pleased but you know it sat for many years as being kind of like, okay, that's a large cool mask, right? What does it mean? And you know without the context of knowing what it is, it was a little enigmatic. Still very cool but having the objects in a database that can be presented to anybody as, you know around the world.

This is the Larco Museum in Peru, which is a model. The director of the Larco Museum was here. He has a collection of 45 thousand objects. You can visit every single one of these objects in high resolution because every single object in their collection is on the web. I think that's fantastic! We don't have museums in the United States that have that. And our best example comes from Lima, Peru. If you look very carefully we have a piece that was stolen from Peru, was returned by U.S. Customs. It was at the Peruvian embassy and they said would you please put this on display? And I was like, “oh my God, that's huge.” And this piece has been stolen twice from Peru. 'Cause the market is so high for them. We're trying to reduce that market. This piece, after the exhibition will be going back to Peru, to its right home. Peru is a nice example because this is using drones to document archaeological sites in Peru. We really are, you know it's not just archaeologist as Indiana Jones with a shovel and a whip. We use drones, we use satellites. We use best technology available to help us understand and preserve cultures for the world.

Omara Massoudi: A nation stays alive. When its culture, stays alive. Our people should know what happened. They should know about their culture about their history. That is true for every culture around the world. They should know about their culture. They should know about their history.

It's a win, win situation for everybody. We need to do the inventory of the collections and sites. We need to help with the repatriations. And we need to get people excited about visiting these countries where they come from, like Egypt. Thank you very much.

Culture Heroes: Fredrik Hiebert

From Afghanistan to Peru, National Geographic Archaeology Fellow Fredrik Hiebert shares his enthusiasm for protecting cultural heritage by helping to repatriate looted artifacts.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.